> Visionary founder with the perfect background...
> Disrupting the incredibly horrible experience of inventing a physical product...
> Top-tier investors...
> Board of directors stacked...
> Crazy high community engagement...
> ...an exceptional team of engineers, designers, marketers...
> So if everything was so good, how did the company spend $180M of investors’ money, sell very little product, replace the founder/CEO, layoff nearly the entire company, and file for bankruptcy?
How about, just for one second, that we pretend that all of these characteristics don't necessarily prescribe a successful outcome?
I had the same reaction when I read that passage. By the end of the piece, though, I thought it was pretty clear that the author is trying to make the point that the "right characteristics" aren't what matters; what matters is knowing your customers and running a learning organization that, week after week, gets better and better at serving their needs. From later in the article:
>"Quirky never iterated on its products ... instead Quirky re-focused its energy on coffee makers and pet feeders and 50 other things. Lack of product focus had a nasty side-effect. When you look across the Quirky product line, you’re left with one fundamental feeling: confusion."
>"Many things can go right for a company but at the end of the day you must do one thing really well: sell a product that delights your customers."
With that said, I think he could have set up the "nailed nearly everything" passage to make it clearer that he was in on the joke, saving his readers a few groans in the process.
I think, for Quirky, the key question was who are your customers? Was it the inventors, or the consumers whose problems the inventors were trying to solve?
I had a Quirky Wink Spotter and it was just shy of usable. How they failed (for over a year!) to issue a software update that fixed the problem of getting hundreds of push notifications every time the thing moved, I will never understand. Coalescing was not in their vocabulary. This was not an exceptional team of engineers, by any stretch. It was apathetic people who knew how to cobble stuff together, but didn't give a shit about doing the last finishing touches to make the stuff usable.
Seriously, let's be honest, who wants to buy pieces of plastic that are minute improvements over existing products? Their best seller was a multi-jointed power strip. [1] The rest were half baked ideas from inventors that have no desire to scale their business. They were pumping out products that were decided in an echo chamber of inventors, not consumers. It's a great idea, but not enough premarket research was done before shoving it down peoples throats.
Edit: the fact that their forth bestseller was a silicone yolk separator doesn't really set the barrier to entry high. A plastic water bottle can do the same.[2]
They were flying too close to the mirror, not the Sun.
I have one of those power strips. It's really great!
I usually keep it in a simple tight circle. Right now it has a couple of MacBook Pro AC adapters, another AC adapter for a network switch, and a few regular AC plugs.
It's super easy to arrange it to fit all kinds of power plugs without them getting in the way of each other.
That's awesome that you're enjoying it! I'm just saying, they spent a ton of time/money on vetting ideas, R&D, and manufacturing, just to have it knocked off for $5 to $15 [1]. Why did they make such risks by manufacturing before gauging demand? A simple pre-order or crowdfunding campaign where fix batches were pre-sold and repeated until steady orders came in would make sense.
That's precisely what the article says: instead of improving and iterating on their product, they just moved on to building something else as soon as the first version is released.
Yep, my quirky nimbus which was basically a customizable dashboard device stopped working after a few weeks. The API endpoints basically borked, but they refused to fix it. These days, it literally sits unplugged on my desk. Why it's still on my desk beats me....
> [...] This is not an overstatement: building 50+ hardware products a year as a startup is the modern-day version of gluing feathers to your arms and flying.
> It may sound harsh but at nearly every step of the way, the loftiness of Quirky’s ambitions far outpaced the laws of physics. The 6 year journey of the company was a balancing act between an extraordinarily bold vision and a fundamentally broken business model.
I'm feeling a disconnect here. It's important for everyone involved in something like this to what to put the positive spin on things. But, how do we say "founder with perfect background", "stacked board", "exceptional team of ____", "top-tier investors", yet have them all part of a company that utterly fails to understand some fundamentals of constructing a healthy business?
If a founder has the perfect background, they know roughly how much of the elephant to bite off. A stacked board would know when to redirect the actions and efforts of their operating team wildly throwing themselves at any effort they dreamed up. Exceptional engineers and designers see a flood of independent projects and say "no."
It's easy to hindsight a failure, for sure. But maybe we could be more honest with ourselves and talk about a team that and some lessons to learn, and did just that. I feel like we're often asking too much of young startups like this -- everyone has to be a visionary or a rockstar, every engineer needs to come from Stanford or name-a-school, every board stacked with billion dollar tech board members.
Maybe we can instead let "we had a team with promise and opportunity" be enough?
Exceptional engineers? There's a Quirky cable guide on the desk in front of me, and if the engineers who worked on that were exceptional, then I posit that they didn't get enough time to work on the product.
It's a fine concept, no question. But a few more iterations would have helped it. I get an impression that Quirky wanted to push out things quickly, not spend a lot of company hours obsessing over the precise width of the cable gaps or how smooth the plastic should be.
I don't know if you read the article, but you just made his point in 5% of the verbiage. Granted, he included evidence/argument, which has a lot of value.
No, no, I was just plugging that in because in reading the other comments it was clear that lots of other people had NOT read the article, and were missing the point, and I wanted to call attention to your summary.
Nothing prescribes a successful outcome, in a sense anything that looks too perfect on paper tends to implode because of the unrealistic expectations by all the stakeholders, see: Color.
This is one of those stories where I initially go "wait, quirky failed?" and then I think of the Quirky Eggminder that I purchased and realize, "yea, that product really did make me a sad and angry customer."
For those who don't know, the eggminder was a wifi enabled egg carton paired with a smartphone app that tells you how many eggs you currently have, how old each egg is, and notifies you when you need more eggs. For a guy who eats eggs two-to-three days a week and isn't quite sure how many are left in the carton when he's at the grocery store, it was pretty nice.
Unfortunately, if you've ever put batteries in the refrigerator (think of that NYTimes review of the Model S), you would know they don't function very well at low temperatures. The egg minder runs out of batteries within a week, at which point it becomes a glorified and overpriced egg carton.
One glaring flaw made the product useless. Today I've learned that was true of most of their products.
How can this have been a thing? First, eggs don't need to be refrigerated; they keep at least a week at room temperature. Second, they can be bought in lots of 6, 12, 18, and 36 in most supermarkets; choose based on your rate of consumption. Third, they're dirt cheap, typically less than 25 cents apiece. We're talking Vessyl levels of pointlessness here.
Are you European? The reason I ask is because the US and the EU take opposite approaches to the issue of egg safety. In the EU eggs are not allowed to be washed before sale, that means the eggs retain their natural anti-bacterial coating from when they are laid, so they are naturally microbe resistant and that's why European eggs are not refrigerated in the store. In the US they mandate that eggs must be washed before sale, but the egg shell is a semi-permeable membrane, and washing off the natural coating renders the egg vulnerable to spoilage, therefore it must be refrigerated or the eggs will tend to go bad.
At least in Sweden and Finland it is recommended to refrigerate eggs. This way the eggs are edible up to two months, even though the packaging (based on EU rules) says 28 days.
There are different patterns for egg storage even in Europe, with or without fridge, etc. In any case, I use the "floating egg" test every time I cook an egg. If the egg floats in water, I don't eat it. No need for a dedicated device.
I'm a 'Merkin, actually, and I've never had problems leaving eggs out for a week, then eating them hard-boiled, scrambled, or over-easy. Then again, I sometimes find it hard to understand the Purell Nation in which I live.
You have 1/20000 chance of having an salmonella egg in a batch that can be inactivated with proper cooking.
For people with working immune system basically any food is safe-ish. So we are overdoing it. But there are people for which (AIDS, immunosuppressors, cancer) a very low bacterial load could be deadly.
It does depend on the kind of eggs you buy. If you buy eggs from chicken in cages where chicken peck each other to death, I assume that your salmonella risk is higher than if you buy eggs from free ranging chicken in organic farms.
At least that's what I like to tell myself when I buy the fancy eggs at twice the price.
A few thoughts - there are people that cheat on the "free range" label. Sometimes the free range chickens if done improperly can live in worse conditions than caged. And industrial farms have really got good at safety. That doesn't mean don't buy. It means research so that you are not ripped off.
My opinion is follow the flavor - absolutely anecdotal evidence - but the deeper and more flavorful an animal based product is - the better living conditions the animal had. The tastiest eggs I have eaten were the ones which I have stolen right under the hens in small family farms.
While the battery oversight was bad, who actually cares about how many eggs they have left and needs to be notified? It's a non-problem first and a hardware oversight second.
Apparently GP cared since he paid for the product. The thing about optimizing day-to-day life is, everyone has different needs and priorities, and everyone has different personal shortcomings they want to correct with technology.
Then you're gonna love the product which is a wifi enabled battery monitor paired with a smartphone app that tells you the current charge of a battery.
Actually the fridge lightbulb might have been a better place to source power.
But given a product description like eggminder, I would assume the company would fail anyhow. While there may be some people who need eggminder v2.0, there aren't very many of them. Eventually someone will invent the IoT device to end all devices, much like how the iPhone ended up reducing the number of gadgets a person needs.
So maybe they failed due to lack of iteration, but maybe the wacky gadget business just isn't a good one.
This is the EXACT problem I had when trying to make a "fridge temperature puck" - batteries work less well in very cold situations, probably due to low temperature decreasing molecular reactions. I was planning on having an Arduino collect stats and then display them as a webpage over Wifi.
There are basically 2 solutions, and I feel both are inelegant:
1. Use part of the battery voltage in a heater that warms the battery enough for it to continue reacting and producing voltage.
2. Locate the battery outside of the fridge somehow, with a long wire to the rest of the device.
You're not thinking future-proof enough! Each shelf needs to have NFC coils embedded throughout. With just outlets, you'll run out as soon as you have an Eggminder, a Milkminder, and a Sixpackminder
I think the sad thing is I never even knew Quirky existed. I'm not hard core into the invention/maker scene but I've been on this site for almost 6 years as a participant and never heard of it. I think the article raised some excellent points though. I think that the ideas that stuck should have been spun off as their own company to iterate and improve things.
There was a Quirky mid-aisle display at Wal-Marts for a while. I also see their organization stuff at Marshalls/HomeGoods on an irregular basis. Quirky made Wink, the home automation product line, which has a permanent endcap in most Home Depot and Target stores. As the article mentions, the lack of strong branding was one of their problems; it's easy to see their various products throughout a store and not realize they're all from the same company.
I also didn't know anything about them until hearing about the shutdown but now that you mention it I have seen the "Wink" stuff in Home Depot and probably elsewhere. However that was negative signaling for me, since Home Depot is not a name that I trust for tech but just a place I go if there isn't time to order something. With Nest products however it was because I had heard of them long before seeing them in Home Depot that my reaction was neutral-positive for retail stores carrying them. I don't expect my jaded 20-something outlook to represents most shoppers but it would've been cool to know about.
I had heard of them, but I still have a similar reaction to you. It's right up my alley, e.g. I've bought all kinds of random hardware on kickstarter, but I've never bought anything from Quirky even though I would have loved to.
One example I remember distinctly, at the beginning of last summer Uber did a promotion where they delivered Quirky smart AC's with installation for a few hundred bucks. Fast forward a year to when I needed an AC I actually looked around for a Quirky one since I remember being intrigued, I figured by now they might even have a newer version and have worked out some kinks. But there was basically nothing to be found, it had just been a one-time thing on the part of both Uber and Quirky.
It all makes sense now reading the other comments here. Turns out that was just their business model, to only ever release one-offs instead of building quality product lines and iterating on them.
They were one of the big NYC startups so I heard about them pretty frequently in the community here. Their product distribution was fairly widespread, you would see their products in big box stores like Bed Bath & Beyond, but not sure if it would stick out if you didn't already know them.
With all due respect to the author, Quirky failed because they didnt care about their community and users. It was a predatory business, like Davison and other companies that prey on the ignorance of their customers.
Quirky failed because a business that exploits their users cannot succeed long term in an interconnectred world.
If the customer service experience was anything like what it was pre-pivot, I'm not surprised they failed.
When they were going out of business/pivoting, I ordered a bunch of their inventory at a large discount. One week after the "expected arrival date" (and 14 days after my order), surprised that my order hadn't arrived, I emailed them asking for a tracking number. They told me that it was waiting for the carrier to pick up the order and that I would get a tracking number that day. Every two days, repeat the same thing. Promises, no tracking number. Finally, 5 weeks after the order was completed, I received a tracking number.
Terrible experience, for what amounted to a bunch of (fun) junk.
Why quirky failed, kickstarter. It was an awesome idea, but kickstarter handles the long tail, shards and distributes the workload, and is universal. That is why Quirky failed.
I think the Kickstarter model also massively de-risked the process by introducing a pre-order model that gave you a sense of the potential revenue ahead of time before you went an invested $100k on tooling.
Or a pre-order threshold below which they conclude the product has below average market potential and isn't worth investing any more time and money on actually getting it to market?
This makes the most sense to me. This kind of innovation was going to happen, would it be centralized or decentralized? For now looks like the latter, made sense to fund both models.
Actually, given how many problems some Kickstarters have with manufacturing, having a company like Quirky that could come in, having experience with manufacturing, design, shipping, etc, could make many of those a much better experience.
Well it was going to have to be something like that, wasn't it? If they were such a stellar team, they're much less likely to fail to convince anyone to fund them, or make some dreadful legal or accounting mistake that got them shut down, or get bogged down technically and never release a product.
If you aren't going to fail for prosaic reasons, you're either going to succeed or find that your initial ambitions were impractical and unattainable.
I met Ben Kaufman at TED, when he was working on Kluster. It didn't impress me then and Quirky never really impressed me either.
Kluster itself was, well, a cluster* at TED. They didn't really have a good idea or execution, and his team was... well, more interested in taking in the sights than slamming to get the project done (with one exception, but that guy was going to be leaving the company). It felt like an extended college party rather than a company.
Sure, Kaufman started and sold Mophie. Not sure that puts him in 'visionary founder' territory, and raising $180m doesn't prove anything beyond your ability to raise money. That's a useful skill but clearly not enough.
Now, I don't know Kaufman personally, and only interacted with him at TED, so it's possible he's actually a visionary. And all startups come with uncertainty and risk; maybe this wasn't an execution problem, maybe the entire idea was never going to work, and it took someone trying it to find out. Because let's be honest, nothing guarantees a startup is going to work. That's sort of the essence of startups.
We see those ingredients adding up to a win all the time because of survivorship bias. So maybe it's good we see Quirky fail and talk about it, to remind ourselves that there are no guarantees when you're doing something brand new.
I saw Ben (I think it was Ben) speak at the Solidworks conference in San Diego, about 4 years ago. I was familiar with Quirky before his big talk, (I'm an industrial designer) but walking away from the talk I was thinking, "This is fucking brilliant. They set up a system to get free ideas, gauge interest, receive feedback, iterate a product, and have a batch of initial customers ready to buy something once its developed. They're outsourcing a decent amount of work to the customers, and the customers are happy to get small royalty checks."
They told the story of the kid that led that power strip's development through Quirky, and how it paid for his college - but it was easy to see that most customers or contributors or Quirks or whatever they called them would not be making big money by choosing a new product's name or color or whatever.
As everyone else has pointed out, they got halfway to successful with a bunch of products. Their connected products had people excited about them, and many could have turned into legitimate businesses or product lines. But when you're making a new product every week,( 50+ a year) from concept thru development to production, your focus and execution will stray.
09/22/2015 | #17 | Motion to Approve (Debtors' Motion for Entry of (i) an Order (A) Approving Bidding Procedures and Bid Protections in Connection with the Sale of Certain Assets Related to the Wink Business, (B) Approving Procedures for Assumption and Assignment of Executory Contracts, (C) Approving the Form and Manner of Notice, and (D) Scheduling an Auction and a Sale Hearing, and (ii) an Order Authorizing and Approving the Sale of Certain Assets Related to the Wink Business)filed by Jeffrey L. Cohen on behalf of Quirky, Inc.. (Cohen, Jeffrey) (Entered: 09/22/2015)
> Quirky’s product line looks like a random page in Skymall
Ha, this mirrors a comment from an original HN discussion of Quirky:
> It reminds me of those catalogs in the seat-backs of airplanes that I end up reading when I get bored. Lots of stuff -- but nothing really struck me as being all that valuable or novel. Kitsch.
The idea of crowd-sourced invention is cool, but they should have kept their products going with crowd-sourced iteration, rather than just abandoning them for the next thing. Or, maybe they could have sold their earlier products off to third parties to continue developing once they'd established product-market fit. I definitely think there's something there, it just needs to be executed better.
This may sound like a very shallow comment, but what happens to the Wink stuff? I just bought one of the GE Wink light kits & the Wink hub is a "Quirky" product. It's already been a little buggy, but I figured it'd improve over time. Does GE pick up development/support work going forward?
Wink Inc is up for sale separately from the rest of the Quirky business. There are already offers on the table, and their press releases thus far have said they don't anticipate any interruption to that part of the business -- the team's still in place, maintaining the services and working on improvements. There are so many "Works with Wink" products on the shelves -- not just GE, but Cree, Leviton, Lutron, Chamberlain, etc -- that I'm sure that brand will land a home with a future.
Google picked up Revolv via Nest[0], so I'd be surprised if they were bidding. Apple seems like a long shot to me, given their existing projects with TV and Homekit and the fact that they don't seem interested in making home automation devices. Microsoft could be interesting--they seem to lack substance in this space.
'burns through mountain of cash without real business” or some other such garbage'
The writer then goes on to say that they have no real business, they are just cranking out half baked products that are never improved.
There is nothing special about quirky shutting down, it happens to many businesses. If they are bad, or poorly executed they run out of cash and shut down.
The main take away from this is do one thing, and do it well, you can't make up for mediocrity by bundling it together with other mediocre products.
I agree very much with this article. Kaufman is a very cool, stand-up guy; everyone I met at Quirky was smart and nimble and on board with the vision. The products ranged from naïf (hence "Quirky") to straight up brilliant. It makes sense to me that they simply took on too much, and should have focused and iterated on their better products.
Better products wouldnt have helped. Customers dont know something is better until after they buy. They certainly had a branding issue by focusing on their products instead of on their users.
If they asked themselves before making every decision, "how will this help our users invent better products and bring them to market, they may have survived. Instead they asked themselves, " what can we do to make more money."
Their core product was their community, they never seemed to get that!
How much of their $$$ did they spend on Wink and related stuff? I'd love to see the economics of that one product. I'll bet it was a major driver of their problems! I experienced poor software, many support related calls required and then a recall because of a broken software update process!
Super helpful article as I think through some of my own inventions and pursuits.
A friend had mentioned Quirky to me as a potential avenue, and I looked into it about 6 months ago. It looked...cute...kind of like an Etsy and one of those infomercials on TV for the Inventors Helpline or whatever it was. The first impression wasn't straight out excitement, and the second impression surely didn't help.
Personally I didn't like the terms of how they wanted to do business. It reminded me a lot of record contracts and rights management, who gets a cut of what, and while I completely understand it's a valid business model, it's not my preferred modus operandi. As in, I prefer independence, even if it means sacrifices in expedience, funding, or even simple encouragement. Quirky offered an avenue that could be helpful to a certain population, of which I was a member, but I still didn't sign up.
Regarding iteration - or more to the point - lack thereof - I almost can't believe it. Every single music project I create and work on goes through versions. Usually I start with drums (even if I have a melody in mind I need the tempo to work with), then add a bassline or keys, then a guitar, then more as needed. While I'd absolutely love to create a piece of hardware that functions perfectly in Version 1.0, I'm too skeptical / influenced by Murphy's Laws that things will take some experimentation. Knowing "nothing is foolproof because fools are so ingenious" helps, but user feedback should be a real priority!
Another question, apart from the money it raised how much profit did the make annually? Is there a place to get these numbers? Also, shouldn't the quarterly/annual sales numbers be telling them things where not going well? Were the books cooked or just an oversight? There are just so many questions. It is nice to raise money but that is just not enough...
> Disrupting the incredibly horrible experience of inventing a physical product...
> Top-tier investors...
> Board of directors stacked...
> Crazy high community engagement...
> ...an exceptional team of engineers, designers, marketers...
> So if everything was so good, how did the company spend $180M of investors’ money, sell very little product, replace the founder/CEO, layoff nearly the entire company, and file for bankruptcy?
How about, just for one second, that we pretend that all of these characteristics don't necessarily prescribe a successful outcome?